The basic tale that Karl Sabbagh has to tell here is really interesting.
In 1940's Great Britain, an amateur botanist, John Raven, traveled to the
Isle of Rum in the Hebrides in order to expose a leading light of British
Science, John Heslop Harrison, for rigging evidence of a series of rare
botanical finds on the island. For several years, Harrison had been
making one discovery after another of plants which strained the credulity
of his peers. Raven, apparently acting with the support, and possibly
even at the behest, of the scientific community, managed to get access
to the difficult to reach island and checked out the locales where Harrison
claimed to have made his finds. Raven's suspicions were only heightened
by the fact that several of the varieties that Harrison had reported were
no longer to be found where he claimed, that most of the sites did not
correspond geographically or climactically to where the species would normally
be found and by the odd coincidence that each site proved to be in such
a precarious location that the plants could easily be wiped out by rock
slides, floods, animals and the like. This combination of absence,
inhospitability, and easy access to excuses for the disappearance of specimens
might have been sufficient to at least cast doubt on Harrison's work, but
Raven exposed even more damaging evidence in the samples that he was actually
able to find. He was able to show via soil residue and intermixed
plants that the rare breeds had probably been transplanted from somewhere
else, and circumstantial evidence even pointed towards Harrison's garden
at home in Birtley.

In oh so proper British tradition, Raven wrote up his findings in a
very understated letter to the journal Nature, so that Harrison
was subtly exposed, without ever being outright accused. This allowed
him to maintain his reputation with students and the public, but notified
the Botany community that results of his studies could not be relied upon.
As Sabbagh shows, similar investigations later cast doubt on Harrison's
entomological findings too.

Much of this plays out like a scientific detective story and is reminiscent
of Longitude, The Professor and The Madman, etc. But it is also similar
to those books in that it feels like an excellent magazine piece that's
been stretched and padded until it fills 250 or so pages to make it bookworthy.
This requires digressions on tangential topics and a level of detail on
the main storyline which is sometimes exhausting.

But what's most disappointing about the book is that Sabbagh does not
use these extra pages to sufficiently flesh out why the story is significant
in the first place. After all, fraud is a obviously a nasty business
in any field, but Sabbagh misses a chance to tie the story in to the broader
subject of science generally and show why the incident and the reaction
to it are particularly troublesome. The problem is not that fraud,
or shall we say data tweaking, occurs in the sciences; of course it does;
why would the sciences be immune to human vice. No, the problem is
that Science makes special claims for itself, that the scientific method
is a unique tool for discovering the truth, that the impartial application
of reason and the methods of trial and error and peer review function in
such a way that the margin for prejudice and emotion have been eliminated,
removing the messy human factor, and rendering some kind of immutable truth
at the end of the process. In this sense, Science which was supposed
to supplant Religion in explaining the world around us, has fallen prey
to the same hubris, a kind of inability to admit the theoretical nature
of what it reveals and the possibility of error.

Sabbagh, in trying to understand the reasons for Harrison's actions,
presents case histories of a few other incidents of fraud and finds a common
thread running through all of them:

Someone believes in a theory, expects to be able
to extend its significance with more research, fails
to get the results he needs, and decides to manufacture
them.

This accounts for some outright fraud, and, of course, we are typically
distrustful of scientists whose results happen to be beneficial to those
who fund them--if you get your money from Philip Morris we sort of expect
you to conclude that nicotine is not addictive. But what's missing
here is a discussion of how the political views, religious beliefs, professional
pressures, psychological quirks and mere personal foibles of scientists
could contribute to much the same kind of fraud, even unconsciously, or
merely to a kind of willful misreading of evidence. In Britain the
book was subtitled "How Botany's 'Piltdown Man" was Unmasked." That
was presumably dropped here because so few of us would recognize the reference.
But the Piltdown scandal, involving a deliberately fabricated "missing
link" fossil, was an excellent example of how the predisposition of the
scientific community--in this case an overweening desire to find corroborative
evidence for evolutionary theory--can, indeed must, contribute to
dubious findings and can lend even fraudulent science an air of legitimacy.

Ultimately, Sabbagh has given us a fascinating peek behind the Wizard's
curtain. However, by not tying his story in to the more general issues
concerning the reliability of science, he has lost a chance to make the
tale truly relevant to our understanding of scientists and of the practice
of science. Because the reach of his ambition is so short, the booklength
treatment seems a tad much. The result is nearly as frustrating as
it is interesting. It's worth reading but is perhaps best read in
conjunction with some Karl Popper
or Thomas
Kuhn for the sake of the perspective they can add in terms of the nature
of scientific theory.

Comments:

From the point of view of those of us who weren't there your review is both good and understandable. I was privileged recently, though, to come across a review written by someone who was *there* when these events allegedly took place. From his point of view, things look much different, and, frankly, much less incriminating (and therefore less scandalous, which then makes the book less saleable, etc. etc.).

You can check it out here: http://naturalscience.com/ns/books/book08.html